It would be unethical of me to offer stock tips in this space, so I'll just phrase this as a question: Why is Wall Street hammering Clearwire Corp.? After reaching a high of $33.30 on July 19, the share price for the WiMax network startup has declined 37%. And on Tuesday the stock dropped 7% "on no news whatsoever," as The Motley Fool put it.

A company's life can depend on its ability to anticipate technological, financial, regulatory, and other big forks in the road, but heaven help us if we must spend all our waking hours thinking like actuaries and lawyers

We're all waiting for the big news next week: Will Google finally announce the Google Phone? Well, I am ready for the Google Phone. In fact, I know exactly what I want to do with it when I first get my hands on one, assuming there actually will be a Google Phone. Here is my list of questions.

Not all of them, obviously, but during my tip to London this week anyone within sight of my iPhone sidled up next to me quickly for a demonstration of how it worked. There were lots of oohs and aahs, quickly followed by bahs.

With his post today, my colleague Eric Zeman raised a great question: Is anyone actually watching mobile TV? If by that he meant people watching video on their iPods, yes, I see many iPod users watching video. If, however, he meant people watching V CAST and other mobile TV services that stream over cellular networks...

Verizon Wireless launched its MediaFLO-based V CAST mobile TV services back in early March to two dozen or so markets across the United States. Today, Verizon added Corpus Christi, Texas, to the list of markets, which has swelled over the past few months to 37.

Engadget managing editor Ryan Block struck a nerve yesterday when he posted a scathing attack on keyword popovers, such as those supplied by "IntelliTXT / Vibrant Media and like ad services whose entire business depends on polluting your content, confusing your audience, and tricking them into clicking on ads that just won't go away."

Three stories in the news this week demonstrate that intellectual-property policy is set by crazy people. NBC is threatening to dump iTunes unless Apple violates the laws of nature. An organization of science fiction writers is sending willy-nilly takedown notices for property it doesn't control. And Viacom pirated a YouTube video, and then sent down a takedown notice against the video's real author.

Hey, want to win a lawsuit even if you lose? Or better yet, want to get a verdict against you overturned even when it isn't? Just drag the original lawsuit out, oh, say about four years and when you lose in court file an appeal and let that drag on another four years.
It worked like a charm for Microsoft.

Consumer confidence faltering in a sputtering economy, jobs continuing to move offshore at rapid pace… is this a time to laugh at outsourcing? Why not? As outsourcing vendors get increasingly sophisticated, and as corporate America gets increasingly greedy about the cost savings, here are a few glorious changes that we can look forward to.

I haven't had a nice high-colonic IRS audit in a while, so what the heck: Of all the deep-seated horrors within the IT organization you now head, this is the killer: "60% of the IRS employees contacted by testers posing as help desk workers were talked into changing their computer passwords over the phone." A new CIO can't fix that -- but wholesale outsourcing

Having long taken the position that there are many things which need to be fixed in Vista, I'm happy to see Microsoft is at work on a beta of Service Pack 1 for Vista. On the other hand, an examination of Redmond's documentation reveals that there may some significant shortfalls when SP1 ships in early 2008.

For most applications, the storage industry is fairly adept at delivering requisite performance. All, that is, except for large data set processing. Think: Financial market modeling, or digital image rendering, or seismic analysis for the gas and oil industry. For these applications, thousands of servers churn away for days before the job is finished. And when there's a lot of data fetching, the speed of the storage system is critical, and in most cases, currently inadequate. Gear6 thinks it ca

I had a long briefing with database legend Michael Stonebraker today, and I feel compelled to share a few highlights of the conversation. Stonebraker is known as a visionary, and he has consistently turned those visions into long-term bets through commercial startups. Today's prediction? "Sooner or later, the entire data warehousing market is going to move to column-store solutions," Stonebraker asserts, column-store being the architectural basis of his latest venture, a startup called Vertica.

Management philosophers have held forth for years on the chief role of the chief information officer. We've been told that they must be adept at managing complexity and managing the ever-accelerating pace of change and even managing their bosses' expectations. Let's hurl another esoteric priority into the mix: managing uncertainty.

The ripple effects in the mobile and wireless market continue to spread, in ever more Byzantine ways. Today Reuters reports that "Research in Motion Ltd shares rose more than 3 percent on Thursday on renewed market speculation that Microsoft Corp could be interested in buying the BlackBerry maker."
This according to one analyst would be "in response to Google's recent announcement that it is interested in ma

To learn more about what organizations are doing to tackle attacks and threats we surveyed a group of 300 IT and infosec professionals to find out what their biggest IT security challenges are and what they're doing to defend against today's threats. Download the report to see what they're saying.

Is DevOps helping organizations reduce costs and time-to-market for software releases? What's getting in the way of DevOps adoption? Find out in this InformationWeek and Interop ITX infographic on the state of DevOps in 2017.

Chances are your organization is adopting cloud computing in one way or another -- or in multiple ways. Understanding the skills you need and how cloud affects IT operations and networking will help you adapt.